Category: culture

Over the past few days, #MeToo has emerged as a viral social media trend used by women to express solidarity in the face of a culture of sexual harassment and assault. The top three emojis used with #MeToo are the red heart, the broken heart, and the pensive face - conveying an emoji emotional signature of love, heartbreak, and disappointment.

Emojis have been called the world's fastest growing language. Yet remarkably little research has been done on differences in emoji usage between cultures. Previous analysis has usually focused on aggregate differences between countries based on data from third party keyboard apps. Here, we analyze emojis in nearly 35,000 tweets in nine languages about a common topic: the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, which began this past weekend. In doing so, we see broad commonalities across languages but also noteworthy and meaningful differences.

The past week has seen a whirlwind of social media activity around the death of Fidel Castro, Thanksgiving, and Black Friday. We were curious about how people used emojis to discuss these topics so we looked at some data from Twitter. Check out the complete post on Emojipedia!